Scott Cairns' "Possible Answers to Prayer"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s poem is by Scott Cairns. Cairns is the author of ten collections of poetry, one collection of translations of Christian mystics, one spiritual memoir (now translated into Greek and Romanian), a book-length essay on suffering, and co-edited The Sacred Place with Scott Olsen, an anthology of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. It won the inaugural National Outdoor Book Award (Outdoor Literature category) in 1997. He wrote the libretto for "The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp", an oratorio composed by JAC Redford, and the libretto for "A Melancholy Beauty", an oratorio composed by Georgi Andreev. Cairns's poems have appeared in journals including The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Image, and Poetry, and have been anthologized in Upholding Mystery (Oxford University Press, 1996), Best Spiritual Writing (Harper Collins, 1998 and 2000), and Best American Spiritual Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 2005, and 2006).

—Bio via Wikipedia

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday,
0:06.9	June 19, 2023. Today's poem is by an American poet. It was born in 1954. His name is Scott Cairns.
0:16.0	He is the 2014 recipient of the Denise Levertov Award and was a 2006 Guggenheim fellow.
0:23.7	He is known for a number of wonderful collections of poetry, including most recently Anaphora,
0:28.6	which came out in 2019, and Slow Pilgrim, which came out in 2015.
0:33.3	One of my favorite collections of poetry is his book Lo's Amensity, Mystics on the Endless Life,
0:40.7	which came out in 2007.
0:43.0	The poem that I'm going to read today is called Possible Answers to Prayer.
0:49.4	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, a few observations, and then read it again.
0:54.8	So here is Scott Cairns' possible answers to prayer.
1:01.0	Your petitions, though they continue to bear just the one signature, have been duly recorded.
1:07.7	Your anxieties, despite their constant relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value,
1:14.2	nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind.
1:18.5	Your repentance, all but obscured beneath a burgeoning yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment,
1:25.7	is sufficient. Your intermittent concern for the sick,
1:31.9	the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them. Your angers,
1:40.1	your zeal, your lip-smackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you,
1:47.4	these must burn away before you'll apprehend how near I am, with what fervor I adore precisely these,
1:57.1	the several who rouse your passions.
2:02.9	I'm a big fan of this poem for, I can say three reasons.
2:08.0	We'll keep it simple.
2:10.7	One is the rye sense of humor that it begins with,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.